Dennis Hastert, the longest-serving Republican speaker of the House, who later went to prison and admitted in court to sexually abusing boys he had coached, died at 84.
Kendall County Coroner Jacquie Purcell said Monday that he died over the weekend at home of natural causes after being placed in hospice care.
Hastert became embroiled in scandal in 2015, eight years after leaving the speakership, when federal prosecutors charged him with evading bank-reporting rules while paying a former student $3.5 million to keep quiet about past sexual misconduct. He pleaded guilty to the banking charge. At his 2016 sentencing, he admitted abusing athletes he had coached as a wrestling coach at Yorkville High School in Illinois, and Judge Thomas Durkin called him “a serial child molester.”
He was not charged directly with the abuse because the statute of limitations had expired. He was sentenced to 15 months, served around 13, and was released in July 2017.
Because of the scandal, his portrait was removed from the Speaker’s Lobby and Wheaton College erased his name from the policy center it had built around him.
Hastert received the gavel in 1999 and held it through 2007, moving much of President George W. Bush’s agenda through the House. His legacy also includes the “Hastert Rule,” which later leaders were urged to follow: the speaker should not bring a bill to the floor without the support of a majority of the majority party.
